As season 2 of Blue Lights comes to air, screenwriter Declan Lawn recalls the nailbiting night he and his co-creator Adam Patterson knew they had a smash hit on their hands
Declan Lawn
BLUE LIGHTS
Making television drama is a highly speculative enterprise. You hope that the project you’re working on will resonate with audiences, and sometimes in the quiet of the edit suite you even convince yourself that it will. But you can never be sure.
When we were making the first series of Blue Lights, we had several moments as a production team when we felt that we might have something good on our hands. The first rough cuts of scenes involving Siân Brooke, who plays Grace, and Martin McCann, who plays Stevie, had an undeniable warmth and chemistry. The younger actors, Katherine Devlin (Annie) and Nathan Braniff (Tommy) seemed to leap off the screen. And then, of course, there was Gerry, the loveable rogue and veteran cop who had seen it all; Richard Dormer’s performance was magnificent, and reminded people that he’s one of the finest actors in these islands.
Even so, as broadcast approached, we knew that all of this might count for nothing. After all Blue Lightsis a drama that revels in the hyper-locality of post-conflict Northern Ireland. It doesn’t compromise in terms of setting, or dialogue, or context. It assumes knowledge that most of the audience just won’t have. People might just not like the show. They simply might not get it. As creative risks go, it was a pretty massive one. On the night the show first broadcast, I was walking up and down my kitchen, as nervous as I had ever been, as my family watched it in the living room. I tried to avoid social media, but couldn’t resist the odd glance at Twitter. Some people liked it, some didn’t. OK, I thought, fine.
I paced some more, and the phone rang. It was Adam Patterson, my co-writer and the co-creator of Blue Lights. He lives five minutes away from me in Belfast.
“Are you watching the show go out?”
“No. I’m walking up and down the kitchen trying not to faint. You?”
“Same.”
A pause.
“Do you fancy a pint?”
“Yes. Very much so.”
Twenty minutes later, we were sitting at the bar in our local pub. The show was still on air. We weren’t saying much. I looked at my watch
